Digital tools to analyze the President’s speech on Afghanistan

President Obama shared an important speech Tuesday night at WestPoint calling for changes in US policy and troop strength levels in Afghanistan. Use the following Wordle “word cloud” with your students and ask them what they can “see” were major themes in the President’s address. Larger versions are available from Wordle.net and Flickr.

To get a better perspective on how headlines about these issues have evolved over time, enter a search for “afghanistan obama” into the Google Labs’ “Google News Timeline” tool and analyze how headlines have been changing. Here’s a link to a saved query I created. Try changing the view from day to month.

What words are NOT in this word cloud which should be in predicting the next 12 – 24 months of news for US forces in Afghanistan?

When you are having students make predictions involving any politicians or the government, you should also have them consider that there are differences between what they say and what actually eventually happens– and why is that? Some great ideas here, though.